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Feminism and Art: Unexpected Encounters Susan (Su) Ballard University of Wollongong, [email protected]

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Feminism and Art: Unexpected Encounters Susan (Su) Ballard University of Wollongong, Sballard@Uow.Edu.Au University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts 2015 Feminism and art: unexpected encounters Susan (Su) Ballard University of Wollongong, [email protected] Agnieszka Golda University of Wollongong, [email protected] Publication Details Ballard, S. and Golda, A. "Feminism and art: unexpected encounters." Australian Feminist Studies 30 .84 (2015): 199-210. Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Feminism and art: unexpected encounters Abstract Since the revolutions of the 1960s, feminism and art have created spaces for thinking and rethinking the links between gender and creativity. Art has been challenged both within and without the frame, as artists and feminists disrupt and complicate pre-established modes of production and representation. Keywords art, encounters, feminism, unexpected Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Law Publication Details Ballard, S. and Golda, A. "Feminism and art: unexpected encounters." Australian Feminist Studies 30 .84 (2015): 199-210. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/2107 Australian Feminist Studies. Volume 30 Number 84 June 2015, pp.199-209. Feminism and Art: Unexpected Encounters Review Essay Susan Ballard and Agnieszka Golda [email protected] Books Reviewed: ● Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, I. B. Tauris: London and New York, 2013. ● Katy Deepwell (ed.), Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology, KT Press: London, 2014. ● Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, Prestel: Munich, London, New York, 2013. ● Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, (2nd edition) Routledge: New York and London, 2010. ● Helena Reckitt (ed.), Art and Feminism, (Abr Rev Up edition,) Peggy Phelan (survey) Phaidon Press: New York, 2012. The artworld has been transformed by feminists at the same time as feminists have been among its chief critics. (Reckitt, 2012, p.13) What we call feminism here is not a movement for increasing women's equality to men. What we call feminism is for all, not only for the biological female. (FAAB Tokyo in Deepwell, 2014, p.93) Since the revolutions of the 1960s, feminism and art have created spaces for thinking and rethinking the links between gender and creativity. Art has been challenged both within and without the frame, as artists and feminists disrupt and complicate pre-established modes of production and representation. Feminism in turn has been challenged by art that asks: what does a feminist subject look like? What does she read? Think? Feel? Make? Amidst the constant questioning some unexpected encounters occur: art made by women is not necessarily feminist art; patriarchal logics continue to dominate the ongoing boundaries of canon formation; and, it remains necessary to examine gender in all its potentialities. As Susan Best writes, it continues to be our job as feminist artists and art historians to address ‘the refraction of the question of the subject through the lens of gender’ (2013, p.143). Subsequently, this review asks: What do you feel when you encounter feminist art? And, who is art AND feminism for? We pursue these questions through five new or recently updated titles broadly collected under the heading of contemporary feminist art history and theory. In many ways the transformations of art and feminism have paralleled those of feminism more generally. In its online glossary of terms, the TATE Britain defines feminist art as “art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory in the early 1970s” (2014). However, feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick reminds us that “Feminism’s success as a cultural force can be measured in the ways that artists – men and women – have embraced, challenged, and renegotiated its assumptions” (Heartney, Posner, Princenthal & Scott, 2013). Each of the books discussed here challenges a narrow model of feminism, locating their arguments not just amidst the familiar waves of feminism but in the mapping of broader genealogies of concern. A common beginning point for feminist art histories is statistical with processes of counting and accounting used to identify inconsistencies in representation. For example, Gemma Rolls-Bentley discovered that in 2012 not one female artist was represented in the top 100 auction sales in England.1 Representation then, becomes a focal point for questioning not just access but control of the means of production: who has the tools to represent, in what kinds of modes, through which kinds of means, and where? 1The Guardian, (2013) http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane- martinson/2013/may/24/women-art-great-artists-men The need to address specific equity issues is paralleled by exhibitions that present a visual challenge to art history. Yet, the sites of feminist power seem to replicate those of contemporary art more generally. For example, the Bad Girls exhibition at the New Museum New York, curated by Marcia Tucker in 1993, and the two major survey shows – Maura Reilly’s Global Feminisms, 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum, and Connie Butler and Linda Nochlin’s Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 2007 at SF MOMA – all mark important moments of transformation in American feminist thought. However, these exhibitions do not easily translate into global and colonial contexts. In GOMA’s broadly inclusive Contemporary Australia: Women, 2012, Australian curators celebrated ‘the diversity, energy and innovation of contemporary women artists working in this country today’, while at pains to avoid the ‘f’ word. The five books reviewed here open up the two politics of art and feminism (with the emphasis placed on the conjunction and). Shared between all the books is a concern for new ways of thinking about art that can enable a historically informed and future focused understanding of feminism. Each suggests a specific context for particular art practices, while at the same time disciplinary boundaries in the visual arts are consciously dismantled. Finally, most of these titles (with various levels of success) make an attempt to challenge the Euro-American-centric dominance of thinking and writing about art. Two of the books discussed here are new editions of important texts originally published at the turn of the millennia. The second edition of The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2010), edited by Amelia Jones embraces the expanded fields of visual culture as defined by critical thinkers such as Stuart Hall and Mieke Bal. Initially visual culture was a method for reading art differently, highlighting ethics that do not discriminate by class or material and that emphasise the social, the bodily, and the cultural. Yet, as Jones explains in her introduction, ‘cultural studies has not always embraced or even acknowledged the theoretical or political pressures of feminism in its critical practices’ (Jones, 2010, p.4). The point of the second edition of the Reader is to counter this tendency. As the volume’s title encapsulates, ‘feminism’ is a theoretical foundation with equal weight rather than a subset of visual culture or cultural studies. Jones has completely restructured the 73 essays in this edition into seven parts to identify a transformative genealogy at the site of feminism and visual culture. This is much more than a temporal update. In particular, Jones takes into account the election of Barak Obama and the ‘global financial crisis’, which she rightly calls the ‘collapse of a global capitalist economy’ (Jones, 2010, p.1). Jones argues these two events have changed everything. In this context, she says, we must rethink power, the body, and representation. The first section, ‘Provocations’, has six commissioned texts that situate feminist visual culture as a site of intersection with globalism, and identifications of race, class, gender and ethnicity. The next section, ‘Representation’, leads off with John Berger’s Ways of Seeing reminding us of its original televised audience2 who reeled with shock at the binary of “men look, women appear.” The other authors here make up a significant reader in their own right, and it is exciting to see Laura Mulvey, bell hooks, Elizabeth Grosz and Laura U. Marks in such close proximity. ‘Differences’ moves toward both the intercultural and the transsexual, with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s challenge to ‘authenticity’ as aligned with concepts of first and third world ethnographic subjects, alongside Sandy Stone’s posttransexual manifesto. ‘Histories’ includes both Mira Schor’s groundbreaking ‘patrilineage’ essay and Catriona Moore’s curatorial essay employing Kristeva’s critique of the semiotics of masculine time. The ‘Readings/Interventions’ section steps into the difficult territories of self, body, colour and violence, and again includes major Australian contributions such as Jill Bennett’s challenging work on trauma. ‘Bodies’ places Judith Butler’s speech act ‘performativity’ alongside Rebecca Schneider’s study of the performing body. The difference between the two essays has always challenged readers to come to grips first with performance as an action and then as an act and it is interesting to see them here together. The final section, ‘Technologies’, leads off with Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, which for those of us who were studying as undergraduates when it first came out, transfixed us and transformed everything from that moment on. Jones does not just present a substantial reader in visual culture, but makes accessible a rich resource of key feminist texts. It is exciting to now see more Australian voices woven throughout this historiography of feminist thought in and of the visual. 2 Ways of Seeing began as a 1972 BBC four-part television series created by Berger with producer Mike Dibb. However, the decision to exclude “the French Feminists” from the second edition is a strange one, as it indicates a decision based on geography and language.
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